1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to mobile advertisements, specifically to such mobile advertisements which have a method for the verification of advertisement display and driver performance.
2. Background of the Invention
Advertising formats are evolving with technology and the appearance of new venues. Existing mobile advertisements for vehicles include private logos on company trucks, banners flown behind low-flying aircraft, drivable billboards, murals on public buses, and posters inside subways and trains. With advances in vinyl technology, advertising companies have recently established compensation systems for drivers willing to display full body advertisements or wraps on their privately owned vehicles, but this typically involves expensive and cumbersome approaches such as hand-selection of product ambassadors who drive a few vehicles along prescribed routes in order to receive compensation. As revealed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,236,330 B1 to Cohen (2001) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,850,209 B2 to Mankins et al. (2005), others have invented systems using separate global positioning systems (GPS) to automatically track and compensate the drivers of vehicles displaying ads, but this requires separate GPS installation with the further disadvantage that the GPS can operate independently from the advertisement and is therefore subject to fraudulent manipulation for increased compensation. In order to counter the potential for fraud using automated remote tracking methods, U.S. Pat. No. 6,374,228 B1 to Litwin (2002) proposes mobile display advertisements with scannable bar codes, cellular transmitters, or other identification devices embedded in the displays, but with the installation of tracking devices at individual points of sale that reward the compensation. While this latter method may help to eliminate potential fraud through automated compensation, it does not anticipate the technology necessary to allow direct tracking from a single centralized source, and requires the expensive installation of detection and verification devices at every single point of sale.